My Life in Pieces (19 page)

In fairness to Strasberg, he has inherited this attitude from his Russian model. Stanislavsky was almost word-blind, and had the greatest difficulty in reading plays, preferring to work on a subtext of his own invention. (Strasberg’s attempt to deny Chekhov’s intense dislike of Stanislavsky’s productions of his plays is feeble and patently contradicted by the writer’s letters – being written in words, they are presumably not to be trusted.) A good deal of Stanislavsky’s system originated in his own personal problems, like his chronic stage fright. Strasberg repeats with approval the Russian’s well-known comment about the actor’s dread of ‘the black and remote hole of the proscenium arch’: in fact, it is a wonderfully friendly aperture for most of us, its very blackness relieving us of the self-consciousness which so bedevilled Stanislavsky and his fundamentalist American disciple. In the last page of the book, Strasberg crossly rejects a trend he has discerned which is anathema to his throbbing, palpating vision of theatrical art: ‘the problem of expression [is] a means of sharing one’s individual way of experiencing… all human beings are in even more need of this, if life is not to deteriorate into the “playing of games”, which many psychologists, and even more some theatre people, have discovered and proclaimed a way of life.’ Now that Strasberg’s influence has disappeared, we can drag the theatre off the psychiatrist’s couch, and out of the seance parlour, and hand it back to the players.

When I arrived at the Drama Centre, though I didn’t realise it, I was in a
state of emotional stasis, locked, armoured, rigid. I was an ideal candi
date for the emotional-memory work that is such a valuable aspect of
Stanislavsky’s teaching, but which Strasberg had elevated into the be-all
and end-all of acting. My great emotional breakthrough came in the sec
ond year of the training; by the third year, thanks to it, I had access to an
unprecedented (for me) physical and emotional freedom. But it never
occurred to me for a moment that the plays of Feydeau, Caldéron, Piran
dello, Ostrovsky, Max Frisch which we performed in that final year could
be reduced to a series of psycho-dramas. Unlike many of my colleagues,
who had been inspired to become actors by movies – especially American
movies – I was absolutely focused on the theatre. I had seen so many great
actors, so many devastating productions, so many towering plays, which
told me that the theatre was a thing of almost infinite variety, that it was
obvious to me that though emotional freedom was essential to any per
formance, it was only a beginning.

In order to survive financially at the Drama Centre, I had been working
for the RSC (helping with the box office for their 1970 Roundhouse sea
son) and at the Old Vic, now as an usher. I saw all the plays in what was
an extremely mixed period for the National, during which the company
spread across the West End, in seasons at the New and Cambridge The
atres, with a series of variably successful new productions. Olivier was
seriously ill for some of this time, which sapped the company’s morale in
a way that suggested that the organisation was dangerously dependent on
his charisma to keep it going. Extraordinary things were happening,
nonetheless, including Olivier’s triumphant appearance in
Long Day’s Journey Into Night
, whose heart-stopping first night I attended (thanks to
my old box-office chums, of course). My enthusiasm for him was not
shared by many of my fellow students, which puzzled me. I wrote this
piece for a Festschrift celebrating his eightieth birthday; it was called
Laurence Olivier and My Generation.

When I was at drama school, the Laurence Olivier controversy raged. Was he the greatest actor who had ever lived? Or was he simply appalling, a ham, external, tricksy, unwatchable, and so on? At that time the cons seemed to be winning. It was, in fact, quite hard to find someone to say a word in his favour, among either my contemporaries or his. This being the case, I generally kept rather quiet. I was a raving fan, and frankly baffled by the inability of people to see what was as plain as the noses on their face (not to mention the nose on his face, rather larger of course, because generally made of putty): that he was the most exciting, the most daring, most interesting, the funniest, most moving person on the English stage by a mile. It’s fifteen years since he was on any stage and nothing has dimmed my memory of a single moment of any performance of his. If an artist’s job is to be memorable, Olivier is the supreme acting artist of my lifetime.

The sensuous impact was shocking. Most great actors operate by stealth: one’s first glimpse of Ralph Richardson or John Gielgud or Alec Guinness was likely to be disappointing. Only slowly did they weave their spell, drawing you closer to them, luring you to the edge of your seat. It was quite different with Olivier. The initial image was always so clear, projected in bright sharp colours; a voice of symphonic splendour, simultaneously sumptuous and piercing; an aptness of invention; an audacity of timing, and no lack of feeling, contrary to report. In the area where he was supreme master – the tragicomic – he was desperately moving: Strindberg’s Edgar, Osborne’s Archie, Shylock, Richard III – all weasel men for whom at bay he found the authentic cry of pain.

Temperamentally, he was not a romantic actor, despite Heathcliff, nor a heroic one, despite Henry V. He was a Realist actor, always grounding his roles in a material, observed reality – thus diminishing them in the eyes of some of his contemporaries, who were used to acting in abstract nouns: nobility, majesty, pathos. Olivier was a very modern actor; for all his unprecedented command of the mechanics of acting, his point of reference was not the theatre, but the world. ‘Acting,’ he told Tynan, ‘is the art of persuasion. First you’ve got to persuade yourself, then you’ve got to persuade your audience.’ The all-important first half of that requirement was never forgotten, as he nagged away at making sense for himself of every moment, winkling out generalisation and banishing it. Sometimes the effect was reductive – but whatever you thought about his decision to play Othello black, instead of nobly moorish, the way in which he executed his interpretation commands absolute admiration: the observation was precise, detailed and brilliantly realised. He forged for that performance the greatest instrument any actor has ever had at his disposal. The physical, vocal and emotional flexibility of it set new standards for the rest of us to measure ourselves against. In fact, of course, none of us could begin to match those standards.

In his short film,
The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner
, Werner Herzog shows Steiner, a skiing champion, entering so completely into communion with his sport, and jumping so far and so high, that he made nonsense of all previous records, to the degree that he was eventually barred from competing: no one else stood a chance. Laurence Olivier has approached his art like a sportsman or an athlete, and he has won the pentathlon. It was his ambition, he told Tynan, ‘to fascinate the public with the art of acting in the same way that they might follow a boxer or
a cricket player’. It was this that lay behind the ritual criticisms of him that I heard so often in my student years: ‘I can see the wheels going round’, ‘it’s all so calculated’, ‘he never moves me’, and, again and again, derogatorily ‘yes, it’s very clever – I suppose’.

It was clever; it was meant to be. It was also, frankly, intended to annihilate the competition. It succeeded there, too. The
victor ludorum
, the glory-boy of the acting world, has, undisputedly, become the Greatest Actor Alive. But this acting that is about acting has proved sterile. It has had no issue. Othello was not the harbinger of a race of super-actors; it was an end in itself. The literalism of the interpretation remained; the giddying virtuosity of the performance flew off the edge of the globe. Nothing was left remarkable beneath the visiting moon.

Every role he played has had to be reinvented by his successors, with only middling results so far. In fact it is acting itself that needs to be reinvented. The post-Olivier vacuum yawns ominously long and large. Many good performances have been seen in the last few years, but there has been no redefinition of the actor’s aim. Olivier accrued all the glory to himself; he won all the prizes. If acting is not about prizes, and not about glory, what then is it about?

Long Day’s Journey
was not the only success at the National during those
seasons: there was, for example, Ingmar Bergman’s radical split-stage
Hedda Gabler
, with Maggie Smith supreme in the title role, and William
Gaskill’s superb revisiting of Farquhar with
The Beaux Stratagem
. For me,
though, those years were most memorable for the brief participation of
Paul Scofield in the company, first in Pirandello’s
Rules of the Game
, in
which he was enigmatic and compelling, and then
The Captain of Köpenick
,
in which he gave a performance so extraordinary that it com
pelled me to rethink everything I thought I knew about acting, made me
waver, indeed, in my loyalty to Olivier. They were bewilderingly different
stage animals, Olivier all acting, Scofield all being. I watched him like a
hawk, and was fascinated once to note the difference between a Saturday
matinee and Saturday evening performance of
Köpenick
; I diligently
wrote down what I noticed – it was the first writing I ever did about act
ing – and six years later when Scofield and I were acting together I shyly
handed it to him. ‘Interesting,’ he said, in that dangerously veiled way of
his. In it, I observed how totally in character he was, and yet how totally
responsive to the audience. I’ve lost it now (or perhaps it just slunk away
in embarrassment), but I think even at that early age, I had an inkling of
the mystery of his art. He was hugely approved of by the Drama Centre
as one of the few English actors who genuinely transformed. This aspect
of acting interested me more than anything else, so I pondered on his
work, seeing every performance in London he ever gave thereafter.
Although he seemed utterly different in every role, the external changes
were not signposts, as with Olivier; the change was internal, a shift of
being, some ineffable realignment of his soul. When I played Pedro Cre
spo in
The Mayor of Zalamea
in our final-year public productions at the
Drama Centre, I froze when I saw that the costume that they had bor
rowed for me had a label stitched to it which said ‘Paul Scofield – Thomas
More’. I put it on as a priest puts on his vestment.

I watched these great ones with new admiration: now I had acted, or tried
to, I knew how difficult the simplest character and the most straightfor
ward line could be to play. But this was not daunting. Not in the least. All
I felt was a sense of infinite possibility. I was filled with irrepressible
excitement for the years ahead. The training had taken me deep into a
new world which seemed to me to be limitless: it had instilled in me a
sense of unending intellectual, emotional and physical challenge. All these
stories, these characters, these visions created by our forerunners, waiting
to be unleashed into the world – ‘images of destiny’, as Christopher Fettes
so inspiringly described them. And I had felt in myself the stirrings of cre
ativity, of power, of transcendence, which could only grow in the
companies to which I felt confident I would belong for the rest of my
career.

I see now that the three years I spent at the Drama Centre were the hap
piest years of my life. I had discovered my vocation. I had a purpose. I was
alive with hope and confidence, not so much in myself as in the powerful
medicine I had it in my gift to dispense: I suppose I felt like the priest I
once yearned to be. I had acquired friends, who stayed friends for the rest
of my life; I had had lovers, of whom the same was not true, but no hard
feelings. I was ready to go, but in some odd way, I could have stayed. I
had a blueprint for the rest of my life. I was filled with meaning.

The Drama Centre brokered all of this. Had I not trained there, I would
have been a different actor, a different person. I went into the Drama Cen
tre a dilettante and a clever, frightened child; I came out as an actor, and
a grown-up human being. Of course, many fine actors have not trained,
but I know that had I not, I would – if I’d become an actor at all – have
piled on the tricks, one on top of another, and would never have created
anything at all. Thirty years after graduating, I made a speech to the
Association of Drama Schools. It was later printed in the Drama Centre
Prospectus.

There’s a well-worn story about acting which rather sums up the prevailing view. Father to son: ‘What do you want to be when you grow up?’ Son: ‘An actor.’ Father: ‘You can’t be both.’ In fact, acting is a very grown-up job indeed. Skilled and sometimes upsetting. Hard, difficult work, underpinned by three firm foundations – example, experience and education.

The first of the foundation stones – example (or tradition) – was an ever-present factor until quite recently; a great line of succession which could be traced unbroken back to Shakespeare’s actors, Burbage and Kemp. Somehow, somewhere around the 1970s and early 1980s, for a variety of reasons, the succession was broken. There were no applicants for the job of Leader of the British Theatre. The very idea seemed outmoded, undemocratic. Good actors, wonderful actors, appeared, but no one wanted to lead from the front. They left that to the directors. Actors abdicated from the position of being (the phrase is unavoidable) role models.